Cutting Through The Crap

Friday, January 16, 2009

Miracle on the Hudson

A highly experienced pilot and crew put to use all of their training. A fleet of boats shows up within minutes. Not a single person was lost, many barely got their feet wet. It's a truly amazing coming together of capable and dedicated people and events. Not to mention a plane that evidently floats better than it flies.

Inevitably, people on the scene and people watching and opining are calling it a miracle, and thanking God.

Right.

Know what I'd call a miracle? How about if God hadn't tossed a bunch of geese into the engines in the first place?

There is no such thing as a 'pilot's assistant'. There are Captains and First Officers on a 2 man flight deck.

In the case of this flight, the Captain was an older gentleman and there's nothing wrong with that. He did an amazing job (along with his First Officer aka co-pilot).

Now, I could go on and on about why the age of a pilot or his title has nothing to do with his experience, that's just not how the aviation industry works, but I won't. I'll just keep it short.

Have any of you been on a flight where the 'co-pilot' is older than the Captain? I have. I used to think...."wow..the young guy must be really good" or "what's up with the older guy?"

Then, I started dating a pilot (11 years ago. We're hitched) . I pay attention. Age and/or experience has nothing to do with who's in the driver's seat or who's riding shotgun. It all has to do with who was hired first at any airline.

Example: XYZ Airline is hiring.

Applicant A meets all the minimum requirements and gets hired on May 8th.

Applicant B meets all the requirements and then some, but he gets hired on May 9th.

Applicant A has more seniority than B does automatically.

Applicant A has 500 hours of flight time.

Applicant B has 10,000 hours.

Applicant A will be 'Captain' before B will.

So, low hour guy is the Captain and high hour guy is the First Officer.

It's pretty screwed up, basically.

Anyway.

It was a miracle that things happened as they did and that no one was seriously injured.

It was upsetting to me for numerous reasons.

The fact that it happened.

Do we know any of the flight crew? (glued to the news with our phone trees working)

And the one that always gets me....I lived 10 miles from where Flight 232 crash landed back in 1989...then I wind up married to a pilot....What.The.Fuck.

For me, it was the start of an incredible distraction from Dubya's "Walking the Green Mile speech". (umm yea...and just where is Percy with his dry sponge?)

Not that I was going to watch anyway, but before it started, I had my own distraction.

It's on my website. It's not very detailed, but it took me hours of 'in the chair, out of the chair, type a sentence, post a a picture' before I was able to make it sound somewhat lucid.

After having said all that.........I think I'm just going to heat up some leftover pizza, check to see my daughter and Grandkids are sleeping soundly, curl up in bed and fall asleep watching TruTV and having lots to be thankful for in my prayers.

kristi: I think you missed james gaulte's point. Like me he's a retired doc. He was suggesting, I infer, an analogy to the trends in medicine, where physicians' assistants are deemed as qualified as docs. Until, perhaps, the engines flame out.

For The Sake of My Sanity

Some will know me from my other blog, "Surgeonsblog." Of late I've given over to frothing at the mouth as the world descends into stupidity, and our politics and our citizens seem, in numbers enough to be meaningful, unable to see it. So for now I'm leaving surgery writing behind, if for no other reason than to defuse and diffuse my unrelenting sense of doom, and with no expectation of making a difference. These are things that, to me, are obvious. Except that, apparently, they aren't.

RWS™

RWS™: For those who drop by here in the middle, and wonder what it means: it's my shorthand for Right Wing Screamers, which includes such a long list it's tiresome to type it. (I distinguish these blowhards from thoughtful conservatives, of whom I sort of take it on faith that there must still be some.) You know who I mean: Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Breitbart (RIP), Malkin, Savage, Levin, Ingraham, Doocey (more of a drooler than a screamer), Hewitt, Goldberg, Gingrich, Kristol, Scarborough (+/-), Bachmann, Inhofe, Bond, Broun, Boehner, Kelley, Santorum, Cain. To name but a few. Behold them in their unrepentant disregard for reality: the RWS™

My Better Self

Have A Look At My Book

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About Me

I'm a mostly retired general surgeon. With my surgical blog, my intention is to inform, entertain, and possibly educate the reader about surgery, and about the life and loves of a surgeon: this one, anyway. Don't know what I'm thinking, doing a political blog, too.
In an amazing coincidence, I've also written a book, "Cutting Remarks; Insights and Recollections of a Surgeon." It's about my surgical training in San Francisco in the 1970s, aimed at the lay reader with the goal of entertaining with good stories, informing with understandable details of surgical anatomy, procedures, and diseases. Knowing you, I bet you'd enjoy it. In fact, if you like Surgeonsblog, you'll absolutely love the book!